


What Baking Can Do

by freneticfloetry



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Baking, Daddy Issues, Idiots in Love, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:29:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28643730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freneticfloetry/pseuds/freneticfloetry
Summary: Mind over batter. Or: five times Eliot Waugh baked away a bad bout of daddy issues (and one time it was sweet celebration).
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 42
Kudos: 95
Collections: Peaches and Plums Stockings 2020





	What Baking Can Do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hoko_onchi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoko_onchi/gifts), [OfTheDirewolves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfTheDirewolves/gifts).



> Off the record, the unofficial title is "I Did Not Intend for This To Be Songfic (It Just Turned Out That Way)". Title and lyric snippets courtesy of _Waitress_. This is canon compliant through 4x10 and handwavey as hell about everything after. My everlasting thanks to sylph for the beta.
> 
> For Maii, who requested "Eliot baking" (and "Eliot the musical nerd"), and hoko, who requested "Queliot dads" — one of you is responsible for the best time I've ever had writing a fic, and the other is the reason I found a soft place to land in this fandom. Since this was inspired by bits in each of your stockings, and I couldn't decide which one of you to gift it to, it belongs to you both. But I love everyone in this bar, and I'm so proud to be a Peacher & Plummer.

**_slice and serve my worries away  
  
_ **

Quentin wakes to the smell of cinnamon.

He hasn't been hungry in what feels like forever — his appetite has never been great to begin with, but between Alumni Week, his dad's diagnosis, and the default state of his brain in general, the consumption of actual food has fallen a few more spots on his to-do list, landing somewhere just south of showering but well below remembering to breathe.

Still, some things can't be ignored.

He stumbles down the stairs, bleary-eyed and barely dressed, his stomach suddenly a grumbling knot of neediness. Turning down the hall toward the kitchen only makes the smell get stronger, bolstered by bread and burnt sugar and rich, browning butter, and when he pushes through the swinging door and into the room, he's enveloped in a cloud of sweetness and spice… and the sight of Eliot pulling a pan of something from the oven.

El spins to the island, open robe swirling around him, and freezes when he sees he has company, his skin flushed all along his cheekbones and his hair curling wildly around his face.

It is really fucking warm in here.

Quentin blinks first, shifting where he stands, and Eliot raises an eyebrow as he sets the dish down.

"Q. You're up early."

He hugs his arms across his chest, unsure if it means _early for humans_ or _early for you_. Either one takes some effort, these days. "The whole house sort of smells like Christmas, so."

His point has a sharper edge than he intends, sounds more like an accusation than an observation, but Eliot only smirks at its bite.

"While I am not a jolly fat man," he says, "I do come bearing gifts." He pulls down a small saucepan from the pot rack above, spinning the handle in one big hand and waving the other in Quentin's direction. "Step on up, Cindy Lou, make yourself useful."

Quentin blows out a breath, shuffling further into the room. "Sure," he mutters, "that'll be new."

If Eliot heard him, he doesn't let on.

"There's a baking sheet in the freezer," he says, rolling back the cuffs on his robe. "Grab that for me, if you please." Quentin crosses the floor to the fridge, expecting to find a sheet of something he'll have to try hard not to drop as he maneuvers it out of the door, but there's just a slab of metal on its own, chilled to the touch. Eliot nods to an empty space at the end of the counter. "Right there is good, thanks."

The tone is informal, but the space is not. Quentin's only real reference for baking is from faded childhood memories and foreign foodie competitions on Netflix, and he'd always figured it was meant to be messy — just another part of the process, a foregone conclusion. But Eliot's whole setup is as impeccable as the rest of him: a glass bowl and a single spatula, a wooden spoon and the world's tiniest whisk, and a cluster of containers of various size, full of butter and cream and like three different kinds of sugar.

He sets the sheet down in its designated spot, then watches El expertly lift each edge of parchment paper from the pan he'd taken out of the oven and shift it all to the cold metal beside it, until there are a dozen cinnamon rolls sitting squarely in front of Quentin, wafting warm and fragrant right under his nose.

Eliot smiles and shoves his sleeves further up his forearms. Quentin's stomach growls audibly this time.

"Down, boy," Eliot says, his smile slipping into a smirk. "It'll speed things up."

Quentin blinks. "What?"

"The pan from the freezer. Helps cool them down so they can be glazed."

"Oh," he says, and blinks again, thinking of Margo's casual cryomancy, every glass in her hand forever frosted. "There isn't, like, a spell for that?"

"There's a spell for a lot of things. But in this case, just because you can doesn't mean you should." El dumps a bowl of brown sugar into the pot with the butter and the cream and a generous pinch of salt, then sets the whole thing on the cooktop. "Baking is already a science. Adding magic to the mix is like using imitation extracts. You can taste the fake."

To punctuate his point, he pours a stream of dark, fragrant vanilla from an elaborate glass bottle into a small measuring spoon, and into the pot it goes. "Don't think your work here is done," he says, holding the wooden spoon out to Quentin while he whisks. "Everything else goes in the bowl and gets mixed 'til it looks vaguely pornographic."

"O… kay," Quentin mumbles, reaching out to take the spoon.

He makes his way down the line of little containers left, scraping pats of butter and a chunk of cream cheese into the mixing bowl, adding milk and more vanilla and a mountain of powdered sugar. The bowl is heavier than it looks, thick teal-tinted glass that's ribbed all along the outside, and he tucks the whole thing to his torso, braced right beneath his ribs, and starts to stir.

The solids have been softened, clearly part of El's meticulous prep, but it still takes more effort than he anticipated. All at once, he can see his own hands in his head, so much smaller than they are now, wrapped around a sheet of sandpaper at the bench in his father's workshop.

_Come on, Curly Q, give it a little elbow grease._

Quentin shakes away the memory, churning the mixture with more force than may be strictly necessary, and watches Eliot clear the empty containers from the counter with a wave of his hand, his other still whisking away at the simmering pot.

"Seems like overkill for a random weekend," Quentin says. "I mean, alumni madness is over, El, you do know there are no more mentors left on campus to bribe."

And, okay, _bribery_ may be a bit harsh, all things considered, but Eliot hums, entirely unbothered.

"While 'extra' is _extremely_ on brand for me," he says, "these are actually for you."

Quentin's stirring hand stutters and stops, a puff of powdered sugar blowing over the edge of the bowl like snowfall.

"For — um… _why?_ "

"Because you have to eat _something_ ," Eliot sighs. "Your spontaneous hunger strike has not gone unnoticed, Quentin, man cannot survive on coffee and saltines alone. And since you generally have the palette of a four-year-old whose favorite food is SpaghettiOs, I figured you could only hold out against something sweet for so long."

Scowling, Quentin starts mixing again, movements as wooden as the spoon in his hand. "Didn't know my meals were being monitored."

"See, when you put it that way, it sounds less concerned than creeper." El reaches out to click off the cooktop and moves the pot off the burner, the quirk of his mouth self-conscious and a little sad in profile. "Honestly, Q… I wasn't sure what else to do. When you've sacrificed an immortal Yorkie together at the altar of last-ditch desperation, somehow a condolence card just doesn't quite cut it."

Quentin swallows, suddenly, painfully grateful that he's the one with the mixing bowl, just so he doesn't have to relive the sight of Eliot's hands with a mortar and pestle, making magic of Quentin's fragile hope.

Eliot turns toward him just a bit, propping one hip on the edge of the counter, but his eyes haven't come up at all. "Look… as someone who spent a not insignificant portion of my formative years actively wishing my father dead, I can't exactly sympathize here, so. Finding the right words was a little beyond my means."

It isn't the first time he's revealed something personal and painful in the name of friendship, of making Quentin feel better. But the self-deprecation in it is startling, even for Eliot. As if he hadn't followed Quentin without question, gathered the components and given them his own magic, then waited for the fallout outside of Fogg's office and gone back to clean up when it was done. Quentin has no doubt that Eliot had known about his dad, then — Margo had, which is basically the same thing — and even though he hadn't actually said anything, his actions had spoken volumes.

But it's six thirty on a Saturday morning, and Eliot seems to be guilt baking. Because, for whatever reason, he thinks he'd gotten it _wrong_.

The stirring is easier now, the spoon circling smoothly around the bowl, and Quentin looks down to check how his part in this is coming and clears his throat at the sight.

"I think… uh, is this good?" he says, holding the spoon up so El can see. It's coming along fine, pun fully fucking intended — there is absolutely nothing _vague_ about what this looks like. Eliot nods and reaches out for the bowl, and Quentin's open palms almost itch with the sudden emptiness. For a few minutes, that mindless, monotonous mixing had sort of been the perfect outlet for all his pent up… everything.

"The words aren't a big deal, El," he says. "Most people went with some variation of 'sorry, that sucks.'"

Eliot snorts, pouring warm caramel from the pot to a waiting mason jar in thick, golden ribbons. "Most people are wildly unimaginative."

"No, I mean… maybe they just can't do —" Quentin sweeps a hand over the area in general, another action louder than words "— _this_."

El's eyes finally flick up to his, and for a moment, they're caught there, wide and shining and unsure, cautiously searching Quentin's face for judgement. They seem to soften when he doesn't find it, and when Quentin shrugs a bit, those eyes are suddenly the warmest thing in the room.

The ding of a timer breaks the spell, making Quentin jump and Eliot look away.

"It's really not all that impressive," he says, turning to the oven, movements as dismissive as his words. "I'm a child of the Midwest, Quentin. If we can’t actually fix something, our only options are baked goods or some sort of casserole."

He pulls out a pan of chopped pecans, sets it down in the space he'd cleared. Quentin wants to laugh — everything about Eliot is impressive, from the way he looks to the confident way he casts to the way he's done all this and stayed utterly spotless, not a speck of stray flour to be found, when Quentin has been here for all of ten minutes and managed to cover the front of his shirt in a fine cloud of powdered sugar.

The way he'd mentioned his own paternal pain so casually, when it's clearly anything but.

It's the reason that _Midwest_ revelation isn't as surprising as it should be — for all of Eliot's refinement and regality, his labels and his tastes and his _Eliotness_ in general, the way he'd mentioned his father… that hadn't been the tone of some trust fund kid holding a grudge against the man who wouldn't buy him a new Mercedes. It sounded like an open wound, deep and painful, patched with a bandaid while it was still raw and ragged and bleeding.

Yet here he is, splitting the skin open again just to get Quentin fed, to lift Quentin's spirits by inches.

Fixing what he can.

In the time it's taken for Quentin to reflect, Eliot has slathered the cinnamon rolls in Quentin's questionable icing, sprinkled the tops with the toasted pecans, and drizzled it all in thin ribbons of caramel. He tears one away from the rest at the closest corner, slides it onto a saucer, and sets it in front of Quentin, its perfect spiral of sugar and spice still faintly visible through it all — swirled darker and tighter the closer it gets to the center, where it's the softest. The sweetest.

"I _am_ sorry," he says. "About your dad."

Quentin slides onto a stool while his knees can still hold him, suddenly starving, his hunger mixing with the sadness and the simmering helplessness, and an overwhelming swell of relief. Thinks of his dad, making soup from a can and sandwiches with the crusts cut off whenever he'd been sick as a kid. Of Julia, silently slipping him string cheese and apple slices when the illness was all in his head.

With Julia gone, and Dad almost there, he'd started to think there wouldn't be anyone left in the world who genuinely gave a shit about him. But here is Eliot, larger than life, serving his care on a plate.

"Thanks," Quentin says, meaning it a million different ways. "So, um… where in the Midwest?"

Eliot freezes for a second, the long line of him a study in tension. Then he raises an eyebrow and sucks the icing off one finger, making himself immaculate again. His other hand reaches into a drawer to pull out a knife and fork, the answer in his eyes crystal clear.

So, _quid pro quo_ it is.

Shoving the silverware aside, Quentin picks up the whole thing and takes a big bite. It's sticky sweet and delicious, the cinnamon a shock of warmth at the back of his throat and the icing melting on his tongue. But it's Eliot's expression, all fond exasperation and hopeful relief, that makes him feel a little fuller already.

"Indiana," El says softly, sitting down with him. "Which reminds me, we're having lasagna tonight."

**_even doubt can be delicious  
  
_ **

Since he'd basically been in Fillory just long enough to petition a god, battle a monster, and watch all his friends die — witches and wooden shoulders and White Lady notwithstanding — it isn't surprising that Quentin has never been down to the kitchens before.

He hadn't planned on seeing them now, either, when Penny had beamed him back to Fillory with a bag full of familiar books. But he'd come in from the gardens and been immediately intercepted by Margo, who'd greeted him with a kiss that was sort of surprising and a demand that was decidedly less so — she'd shoved the button box into one hand and a shopping list into the other, said _You know how he gets when shit's going down, Quentin, and we are already on the ground fucking floor_ , and promptly sent him back to Earth without bothering to explain what said shit was.

As if he didn't have his own Alice-shaped shit to deal with.

Now he's loaded up like a pack mule and making his way along the wandering sprawl of Whitespire, through the throne room and the adjacent great hall toward the place where Rafe had pointed, an unassuming passageway at the other end. The temperature ticks up about ten degrees before he's even made it through the door, and he's not sure what he expected to see when he rounded the corner, but it isn't _this_ — a massive space with soaring ceilings and a stacked stone well and a wide fireplace that spans one entire wall, pots and pans and bundles of herbs strung from racks suspended overhead and huge slabs of meat and fish hung by the hearth, and at least four doors besides the one he's currently standing in.

There are about a dozen people inside, most working around the two tables that stretch down the center of the room, a few stirring cauldrons or turning spits over the fire, all of them head and shoulders too short to be his target. Quentin clears his throat — faintly, then far too loud — until one of the women looks over.

"King Quentin," she says, seemingly stunned.

"Hi," he answers, a little stunned, himself — does everyone just... know who he is? "I'm looking for El— uh, High King Eliot?"

She points to one of the open archways off the back. "In the bakehouse, Your Majesty."

He shoots her something like a smile, and one of the handles in his right hand snaps free, the bag's weight shifting until the circulation in his fingers is almost completely cut off.

"That's me, super majestic," he mumbles. "Thanks."

Hitching the broken bag back as best he can, he shuffles his way across the room and ducks down a short, dark hallway toward the warm glow at the other end. He expects it to be just as busy back here, full of bustling bodies moving seamlessly around each other, but when he stops in the shadow of the entrance, just shy of stepping inside, all he can see is Eliot.

He's technically seen El… _since_ ; there's a copy made of clay back at the cottage, lying silent and too still in Eliot's bed. But this is the form he knows — towering and full of grace, even bent over a workbench, brows drawn together, sifting flour into a big wooden bowl. Quentin's clearly caught him mid-setup, a telltale line of little clay vessels arranged across one side of the table, and it's sort of fascinating to watch the way he's adapted, the duality of the picture it paints — a faded apron slung over some sort of sheer, gauzy shirt that's tied at his side, sleeves rolled at each cuff to the elbow and hands stripped free of rings, the room's worn wood and stone an unadorned backdrop for the drama of the dark crown of gems that still circles his head. It's an image Quentin doesn't think he could forget, but there's the strangest urge to frame it, hang it, label it in bronze: **_High King Humbled_** _,_ 2017\. Flesh and bone _._

He settles for staring, longer than he should.

Then the ticking bomb he's holding starts to give again, shifting and stretching along the only handle it has left, and Quentin says _shit_ and stumbles into the room, trying to defuse it before it blows. Only Eliot's head snaps up at the sound, eyes startled and wide before they settle on Quentin, and the way they flash from surprise to softness to sweet, blinding relief glues his fucking feet to the floor.

"Q." El exhales it on a breath, like the syllable's been punched out of him. "Oh, thank fuck."

"Hey," Quentin says, sort of waving with the bag that isn't currently staging a coup. "Margo made me errand bitch. Her words, obviously. Box grater, piping bags, _six_ non-stick muffin pans, and a metric shit ton of whatever the hell _muscovado_ is."

"Raw sugar," Eliot replies, rounding the table. "Lots of molasses."

Quentin holds the bags out as Eliot approaches and waits for him to take the weight, and Eliot steps into the cavern of his open arms to reach out and reel him in by the back of the neck until he's pressed tight to his chest and tucked beneath his chin.

"Oh," Quentin mumbles, pretty sure he means the sugar. But Eliot's hands are hooked around his shoulder and buried in his hair and everything is sparking in between, electric, like the camouflaged wood woven into his bones has remembered that it's a conductor, and he drags in a breath and drops both bags to the floor and grabs two fists full of El's stupid shirt as the blood rushes back to his fingertips.

 _You should probably hug me_ , Eliot had said, before his whole world had gone sideways.

He gets it now. And he hadn't even had to ask.

There's no telling how long they stand there, clinging to each other in the single square foot where it seems like everything will be fine, but it doesn't feel like long enough. Then Eliot is pulling back, just barely, to smooth a hand along the back of his skull and peer down into his face.

"Return of the king, I guess. It's good to see you, Q. And by that, I mean conscious and in one nonbleeding piece." His voice is wry, but his expression melts into something soft and sympathetic and far too familiar. "Have you seen her? Well not, her, the — _fuck,_ you know what I mean."

He nods, because he does know, but doesn't elaborate, because the way El _hadn't_ meant it isn't exactly wrong. The letter he'd left behind with the centaurs had said that Alice had been buried in the gardens, but the grave is in the inner courtyard, at the foot of a fountain and surrounded by flowers, the spot marked with a raw-edged stone chiseled with her title. And her crown — suspended in thin air, spinning slowly and steadily counterclockwise, with a tiny horse prancing circles 'round its center.

The headstone is probably tradition, if Martin's grave is anything to go by. But the crown is a purely personal touch; thoughtful, delicate magic that can only be Eliot's.

Quentin isn't quite sure how to thank him for decorating his dead girlfriend's grave — especially if she is still out there, a Niffin with Quinn blood that he hasn't locked in a box — but he knows damn well how to deflect.

"Um…" He shuffles back a few steps, just to be sure he can still breathe on his own. "Margo mentioned there was shit going down?"

Eliot sighs and severs contact completely. "And you're surprised by this development? When isn't there, Quentin, our shit is ever-present."

"And this particular shit requires _special sugar_."

"Well, we deal in mysterious ways." His hands twist through a tut that's almost an afterthought, and the bags gather themselves from the floor and float smoothly to the end of the table, Eliot trailing behind them. "It's unrefined, so it retains more minerals. I figured it might be better for the baby."

Quentin steps up to the other side, eyebrows shooting sky high. "The… _baby_."

"I take it back," Eliot says, "you _have_ missed some key plot points, allow me to recap. Previously, on _Fuck My Life_ …"

Holy shit. "Fen is pregnant?"

El hums his assent. "I know it only takes one time and all that jazz, but given the infrequency with which I fulfill my husbandly duties, not to mention my history with substances that aren't all that sperm-friendly, I figured the odds were ever in my favor. And yet… " He spreads his hands. "Mine lady wife is indeed with child. Which I learned, by the way, from Trix the talking rabbit, immediately after my latest attempt at champagne died a dry, overly carbonated death, but _before_ some Fillorian fringe group's suicide strangler attempted to _assassinate me_."

"Wait," Quentin says, " _what?_ "

"Oh yeah. I got garroted." Eliot unpacks the grater and the pans and pound after pound of dark sugar, then folds the horrible Whole Foods bags flat. The gauzy cloud of his collar gapes wider as he moves, and Quentin can see it then — a bruised, blurry line cut just below his jugular, heaviest on each side of the hollow of his throat. "Hilariously enough, it literally stopped me from fully descending into daddy issue madness. Then Bambi stopped the actual assassination."

For a moment, Quentin can't think straight, caught in the mental picture of what could have been. It's bad enough that Julia is broken and Alice is… gone, whatever shape that comes in. But even when they're on two separate planets, he can't imagine living in a world where Eliot _isn't_.

He watches him cast a quick sanitizing spell on the stainless-steel grater, then pull a handful of peeled carrots from one of his carefully arranged prep bowls.

" _Anyway_ , thank you for this," El says, breezy and bright. Doing some deflection of his own. "I can't exactly Venmo you, and we need every gold shitting beetle on deck, so I'm afraid the best I can do at the moment is my eternal gratitude and a slightly sketchy IOU."

"It's fine," Quentin mutters. "But I mean, with everything that's going on… how is any of this even a priority?"

"How is it _not_?" Eliot says, holding up a carrot in each fist. It'd be funny if it didn't feel so desperate. "I am making do where I can, Quentin. I've hacked a spell to set the temperature on an oven that is a literal hole in the wall. I've found every suitable Fillorian substitute in the book. I've got oil from alien vegetables and some seed that tastes vaguely like walnuts and a dozen eggs from a duck who wouldn't stop _rambling about the weather_. And yeah, my actual body may be stuck here, my wife may be expecting, and my subjects may be actively trying to kill me, but I'll be damned if I shred these fucking carrots by hand."

"So you're, what," Quentin prompts, "baking up a peace treaty?"

"You could say that." Eliot sighs and goes back to grating. "My initial reaction to the breaking baby news was less than great, where Fen is concerned, and the follow-up featured me literally choking on what I tried to say. But I can't ignore the elephant in her womb forever, Q. At this point, I don't even know if she's _okay._ Physically. Mentally. So, with any luck, and a tasty peace offering... and perhaps a heavily armed guard, the third time will be the charm. Hence the _mea culpa_ muffins."

Quentin thinks of the books in his bag, the ones on Niffins and summoning and interplanar communication, and then, inexplicably, of cinnamon rolls. Of Eliot's penchant for portioning out the things he needs in precise measurements and lining them all up in order, for folding all the things he can't quite say into batter and dough to make everything a little easier to swallow.

Suddenly the ghost in his head is so much less pressing than the haunted look in Eliot's eyes.

"Are _you_ okay?"

Eliot snorts, the sound of it dark and self-deprecating. _Physically_ isn't the thing in question, and they both know it. "Pretty sure that's supposed to be my line."

"No," Quentin counters, as if Eliot hasn't already asked with his face and his hands and his whole goddamn body. Jesus, he can't believe there was ever a time he actually thought this man didn't care about anything. "It doesn't need to be, El. Not always."

He watches Eliot's expression slide into surprise and then soft, stricken gratitude, watches him systematically crack six eggs into the bowl with the carrots, add milk and oil and whisk it all together. His silence is a gift, in its own way — that he's held back whatever's on the tip of his tongue, the quick, quippy dismissal that comes so easily — and Quentin leans into the table and waits.

"I am… following through," he finally says, scooping sugar out of the only bag he's opened. "I _like_ her, I do. She isn't who I would've chosen, by any stretch of the imagination, but that ship has sailed, sunk, and been lost to the deep. In the grand scheme of things, there are worse people in the world to reproduce with, and of the two of us, I'm not really the one getting the short end of that stick."

There's a beat when Quentin's sure he can feel his heart hurt. "Eliot —"

"But I think she'll be good at this." The sugar goes in with the flour. El's hand only shakes a little. "And I… I'll figure it out."

He adds the other things then — a handful of seeds and a spoonful of coarse salt and a pile of crumbly white powder, a spice that smells mostly like cinnamon and a sap that looks just like vanilla. All the things he'd hunted down to make something he knows from something he doesn't.

Pouring the dry mixture into the wet, he picks up a spoon like a wide wooden paddle and painstakingly folds it all together — the eggs he bought from a subject, the flour he sifted himself, the sugar he suspects will be better for his baby.

 _I think_ you'll _be good at this,_ Quentin wants to say. Eliot, with all his humor and compassion, with his quiet hugs and gentle hands and big heart that makes such beautiful magic.

Eliot, who wouldn't believe him if he did.

He settles on the stool tucked on his side of the table, takes off his bag full of books. It's a big batch of batter, because El doesn't do anything halfway — if he can spare a muffin, Quentin can spare a few more minutes.

"So is carrot cake Fen's favorite, or something?"

"What?" Eliot blinks, twice — once in confusion and once in understanding. " _Oh_. Honestly, I have no idea. But I was kind of a dick to the bunny, so I thought, you know. Two birds, one bake."

**_twist it into sugar, butter covered pieces (nevermind what's underneath it)  
  
_ **

They'd barely sat down to eat before Eliot excused himself. _You all go ahead,_ he'd said, _I just need to finish up dessert_. Quentin had ducked back inside for more wine at one point, seen him flash peeling peaches the way he'd done a hundred times before — slicing them into smiling pieces around the pit, adding a pinch of salt and a pile of sugar, setting the whole pot over the fire.

He'd thought about the sweet cream custard El had made the day before, frozen soft-solid in the magic of their makeshift ice chest, and found himself looking forward to the compote to come before he'd even finished his dinner. Then he'd grabbed a stray slice of peach, kissed its nectar into the sweet heat of Eliot's mouth, and gone back out to the table.

But that had been… a while ago now.

Quentin slides off the end of the bench, holding up a hand when Ari pauses mid-laugh to look over. They don't get many guests, a little too far from town and a little wary of talk — _those mysterious boys at the Mosaic, who whisked away sweet little Arielle Evers_. But her cousin's caravan had come through unexpectedly, on their way to Brighthaven from The Brass City, and avoidance wasn't really an option.

Besides, it seems as if Ari had missed her.

"I'll be right back," he says, backing toward the cottage door. "Just gonna check on… things."

The smell hits him as soon as he opens the door, warm and buttery and fruit-fragrant. There's a deep crockery dish on the stone shelf above the fire, already baking away, and Eliot is bent over the small stretch of counter in the cottage's tiny kitchen, scooping peaches into the bottom of another.

"Hey," Quentin says, deliberately soft, "you disappeared."

Eliot hums. "That actually happened to Todd once, some kind of perception spell gone wrong. Took Lipson like two days to fix." He scoops out every drop of thick liquid cooked out of the peaches and turns to set the pot in the basin to be washed. "To be honest, I don't think anyone really noticed the difference."

There's no room for the kind of setup he usually does, so he's taken over the table as well, every spare soup bowl they own clustered in one corner, containing various components, and a terracotta tureen full of flour in the center. He dumps the contents of each dish inside — cinnamon and nutmeg and crushed coconut sugar, a spoonful of nectar from a night-blooming flower, thicker than agave but not quite as sweet —picks up a paring knife, and starts to cube a block of butter into a cast iron pan.

"How's it going out there?"

"It's going," Quentin says, noting the careful nonchalance of the question. "She seems nice, the kids haven't broken anything. He's… kind of an insufferable ass, actually? But not, like. Mayakovsky level."

"Ah, Mayakovsky," Eliot mutters. "Making insufferable an art form since 1967."

Quentin chuckles, and it sounds as uneasy as he suddenly feels. "How's it going _in here_?"

Eliot hitches halfway to the hearth, then continues, setting the pan of butter off to the side where the fire is low. "It's going," he echoes. "I still don't know if we'll get through them all while they're ripe."

This year's harvest has been almost overabundant — Arielle's oldest brother has brought over fresh baskets of peaches every day for the last week — and between the puzzle outside and the process in here, all the blanching and boiling and breaking them down to be canned, it's been a little hard to keep up. Just this morning El had brought back a big slab of elk short ribs, seared them brown and set them on to braise with onions and herbs in stock and a splash of rich red port, then put on a pot of tomatoes and garlic and honey and vinegar, added a healthy helping of their own peach preserves, and boiled it all down into a makeshift barbecue sauce he had slathered over the meat just before serving.

The leftovers were meant to last them through at least tomorrow; Ari had gone through a three-week period where the sheer sight of meat made her sick, but the last few days she's wanted almost nothing else. With the surprise company, and this impromptu dinner party, that plan is clearly out the window.

Except Eliot's plate is still sitting on the table next to his, nearly untouched and spelled to stay warm. Meena's smug husband has been openly eyeing it for the last half an hour.

"I mean, we really won't get through them _tonight_ ," Quentin says.

"Not with that attitude, we won't."

He sighs. "El, you didn't even eat."

"I…" Eliot starts, haloed by the light of the fire. Then he inhales, holds, eyebrows raising and shoulders rising and mouth dropping open, before everything sort of deflates as he lets the breath back out. "It's not that I _meant_ to leave you out there alone amongst the traveling circus, I just… needed a minute."

Quentin leans back to the counter and casually crosses his arms, hoping to look less anxious than he feels. "Okay…"

El brings the pan of melted butter back to the table and pours it into the tureen, stirring until everything clumps wetly together. Seems that moment he'd needed isn't over just yet.

Thinking back, the afternoon is a bit of a blur. They'd been halfway through the day's second pattern, Ari holed up inside in the shade and working her way through the fresh peach delivery, when the gilded wagon rolled into the clearing. There'd been a round of bewildered introductions — Ari's cousin Meena, a year older to the day, who'd been her closest childhood friend. Meena's mustached husband Silford, squat and a little stuffy, who had barely stopped talking since. Their three girls, spaced like clockwork — six, four, and two — who were somehow the spitting image of their mother.

Quentin had taken the talking horses down to the stream, and by the time he'd come back, Meena — about a month further along with her fourth — was comparing notes with Ari, Silford was smoking a pipe at the edge of the tree line, and the girls were running around with Eliot, one tucked under each arm and another trailing on his heels.

But at some point tonight, it had clearly gotten to be too much for Eliot to deal with.

He'd seemed more than fine at the time — listening intently to their nonsensical stories, letting them crawl all over him as he sprawled out on the tiles, laying one at a time over his feet in the air as the other two begged for their turn.

 _See, I was right_ , Quentin had thought then, watching him laugh as the oldest spread her arms and shrieked. _You would've been so good at this._

El turns with the tureen to settle next to him at the counter. Even here, without his elaborate wardrobe and all his skin and hair care products, just wrapped in worn linen with a week's worth of scruff and wild curls longer than they've ever been, he is still stunningly beautiful. Still looks like the king he'd been once, baking in the kitchen of a castle.

 _Oh_ , Quentin thinks now, watching him sprinkle the _sugarbutterflour_ mixture over the peaches with his fingers. _Oh, shit._

"Hey," he says, sliding along the edge until they're connected at multiple points of contact — arm to arm, side to side, heart to heart. "So I know we haven't really, um, since we've been here, but… you know that you can talk about her, right?"

It's a testament to how long they've been together, in any capacity — how well Quentin knows him, and how well Eliot _knows_ he knows — that he doesn't even seem tempted to toss out an offhand _talk about who?_ in response.

"There isn't a whole lot to talk about," he says, reaching up to wipe his hands on the dishcloth slung over his shoulder. "We bonded briefly over a dead body, fled from both pirates and cannibals, and parted ways when she went off to be a tourist with Todd and I went _back in time_."

It's sort of a gross oversimplification, considering. But when it comes to tough topics, that's what Eliot tends to do best.

"I'm just saying… it'd be totally normal if having a handful of little girls dropped in your lap at various stages of development brought back some bad shit for you."

El snorts, picking up the crock full of peaches and crumble and heading back to the fire. "Because it's been oh so normal thus far. I mean, who among us _hasn't_ had their unborn child whisked away by fairies and returned just in time to experience the joys of teenage bitchiness?"

"Which is pretty much my point," Quentin says. "Watching you out there, playing with them… you didn't get to do that with Fray. And I get it, if it's fucking with you —"

"It's _not_ ," El cuts in, affable as anything. "I had cousins once upon a time, Quentin, playing with kids isn't something that's been missing all my life." He slides the dish onto the shelf, pulls the dishcloth between both hands, and deftly slides the other one out. Quentin would've burned himself half a dozen times by now, but Eliot does it as easily as breathing.

He crosses back to the counter and sits the baked cobbler down on a metal trivet to cool, then bumps Quentin back over with one hip so he can get to the wash basin.

In theory, the cook doesn't clean in their little cottage. In practice, it's a pretty moot point, since Eliot tends to clean _while_ he cooks — Quentin and Ari only end up rinsing plates and cups and spoons after each meal, everything else already washed and dried and put back in its place.

Technically, Quentin could bully him out of the way and actually wash all the dishes for once. But this is part of Eliot's process — scrubbing away the evidence of _in progress_ until all he has left is _complete_.

Besides… watching him fiddle with the pump fed from their rain barrel and fluidly tut the water warm, it seems like he might just need something to do with his hands.

After a few moments of one of them washing and the other watching and words waiting to be said between, El scrapes the stray sugar from an empty soup bowl and turns just a little more toward Quentin.

"There are a lot of things I didn't do where Fray is concerned," he says, and huffs out a breath. "Name her, for example. Points that are all pretty moot now, except…" He streams fresh water over the clean bowls and chases all the suds away. "Honestly? It isn't that I didn't get to do them, Q. It's that I didn't want to."

Quentin shrugs, unsure what else to do. "There was a lot going on. With the Wellspring, and then the, the wedding…"

He shifts his arms across his chest. Idri is another thing they don't really discuss.

"Yeah," Eliot agrees, "and thank fuck for that. When you're constantly driven to distraction, you don't exactly have time to deal. Which was perfectly fine with me. Fen was so excited, and so _ready_ , and I just… wasn't. And I didn't really try to be. I got handed a kingdom to take care of when I could barely take care of myself, and somehow, being a king scared me less than being a dad. Ruling was the best excuse to run from the looming shadow of impending parenthood. I don't even know how long it took to notice that my pregnant wife was missing."

There's a tone he tends to take during these kinds of conversations, the ones they've had when they're alone together since the beginning — sardonic and self-deprecating and utterly unaffected, as if he's narrating something actually experienced by someone else entirely. Quentin's always chalked it up to the price he pays for candor; it still amazes him that El can share such things at all, and that he chooses to share them with him.

But there's no air of anything in his voice this time, just even, unvarnished truth. And Quentin isn't sure if he's laid it all out so plainly so it's clear to him how he'd felt then… or if he's trying to tell him the way he feels _now_.

Quentin thinks back to that morning at Whitespire, with Eliot baking all his best intentions. Thinks of everything he's done for Ari since the news of another unexpected pregnancy, since the whirlwind wedding that followed — making ginger chews to soothe her stomach through the morning sickness, steeping vats of the citrus and herb tea Fillorians drank in lieu of modern medicine's prenatal vitamins.

Whipping up the peach cobbler currently cooling on the counter. Arielle's favorite.

"El…" Quentin swallows, hard, watching him run the rag around in circles inside the tureen. "You know you don't have to do this, right? I mean we, if you, we can —"

Figure something out. That's how the sentence would end, if he had any air left in his lungs.

 _I'll figure it out_ , El had said then.

The thing is, he has been trying. He's tried _so hard_ , this time, has taken care of Ari, of Quentin, of the life they've made together. And maybe he's finally figured out that this still isn't what he wants.

But Eliot just nods, slowly, throat working, wrists sinking beneath the soapy water. The smile that turns up the corners of his mouth is shaky and small, but it's the shine in his eyes and everything behind them, both the sad resignation and the lack of surprise, that makes the real panic set in.

"That wasn't actually the point I was trying to make," he says, dead flat, "but thank you for proving it anyway. Believe me, I am well aware that I'm the optional adult in this situation."

Somewhere an alarm bell is ringing. "That's not what I said."

"That's what _everyone_ says, Quentin." He laughs, bitter and broken, the sound of it as wet as his hands. "Jesus, take a look around. We're a pretty long way from Whitespire and _royalty, bitches_ and loopholing our way out of a fucking world war. We're… _playing house_ in the past in the middle of nowhere, _who the fuck do we think we are_ —"

" _Stop_ ," Quentin pleads, pivoting to halt his words before he can choke out anymore. He presses himself along the length of El's rigid spine, slides his palms around his ribcage to lock them together. "Baby, stop."

He exhales into the hollow between Eliot's shoulders, breathes back in the warm, earthy scent of him, and racks his brain trying to figure out what could have happened to set this off.

Because Eliot had been _fine_.

He'd been fine this morning, when he'd brewed Ari's tea and their strange chicory-adjacent Fillorian coffee. He'd been fine when they finished their first pattern, a starburst that ended up looking more like something with tentacles, before he'd backed Quentin up to their brand-new daybed and blown him until he saw stars in broad daylight. He'd even been fine, if a little annoyed, with the unannounced arrival of guests, and the impromptu dinner party it demanded.

He'd been fine when he'd played with the girls, when he'd plated up the short ribs and potatoes and root vegetables like a five-star restaurant, when he'd put Arielle's plate in front of her — light sauce, extra veggies — and dropped a kiss in the crown of her hair. When the sight and smell of what they'd been served had stopped even Silford mid-sentence, prompted an actual smile and a nudge to El's side and a _Well, I can see why they keep you around_.

Then he'd been silent and subdued and sort of tense under Quentin's hand on his thigh, before he slipped away under the pretense of dessert. But he obviously hadn't been fine.

Fuck, how many minutes has he needed since they started this?

 _That's what everyone says_. And Quentin is rapidly replaying their last few trips into town — wondering if that's why he had smiled so stiffly at the new innkeeper when he'd checked them in for a night a few weeks back, or opted to stay behind when they saw the traveling band the time before that, or wandered off on his own when they'd gone to market the month after the wedding, when Quentin had mended a hand wagon for a woman passing through, then followed her thanks and warm introduction with _This is my wife, Arielle, and my… Eliot_ — when El draws in a ragged breath he can feel in his fingertips.

"Karma," he rasps, on the edge of laughing or crying or some combination of both, "is such a raging bitch. I fucked around and finally let myself look forward to being a father… and the cosmic fucking joke is that I _won't_. Realistically, who am I ever going to be to this kid, Q?"

Quentin's heart constricts just as his lungs expand — he hadn't known it was possible to be this relieved and destroyed all at once.

Then again, he hadn't known a lot of things.

He stretches up on his toes to bury his face in the back of Eliot's neck, pushes his palms up Eliot's chest until he can feel a heartbeat in his hands.

"This kid," he answers, tears sliding from skin to skin, "god, this kid will be so lucky to have you for a father. To have you to sing to them and show them magic and teach them how to bake the way you do, all of it. You're gonna spoil them rotten, but you're gonna take such good care of them, and make them feel _so fucking loved_ … You'll be exactly what you are to me, El, you'll be _everything_."

He hangs on while El's breath evens out, while he pulls wet hands out of the water to slide them soap-slick over his, slot their fingers together, until his shirt is a mess and they're dripping with suds and their wedding rings sit side by side, two bands of metal binding each of them to other people on two people bound to each other.

"We're a _family_ ," he says into his skin, a whisper as fierce as he feels. "That's who the fuck we are. And you don't need to prove that to anybody, okay? Everyone who matters is under this roof, and you make that true every day."

A shudder runs through Eliot, but Quentin stays steady, and the trembling stops cold somewhere between them.

There's something _sacred_ here, in the sopping mess they've made of each other in the midst of El's attempt to keep things neat and clean and in order. In being the one who gets to hold this man together as he falls apart, when it's always been the other way around.

"But…" He curls his fingers in Eliot's, hooks his along, so their hands are joined fists on his chest. "If there's anything you need, from me, from this, _for you_ … can you just, _please_ , say something before it gets this bad, and let us take care of you for once? You can't bake everything away, El. I know it’s your thing, I get that, I do, but at some point it's just not healthy. On, like, multiple levels."

Eliot nods, sniffs, squeezes until their bones shift beneath their skin. Until Quentin hopes he doesn't let go.

"Noted," he says wearily. "No more existential crisis cobbler."

Quentin laughs a little despite himself, then presses his lips to the top of El's spine. "Or at least, like, pace yourself? How much dessert did you think we were gonna eat?"

"Oh," El says, nodding at the dish beside them. "That's the only imminent breakdown baking I did tonight. The other one is for the wee hours, when your wife has all her best shame cravings."

**_make it small, so it fits even this_ **  
  


Technically, Quentin is supposed to be sleeping.

It hasn't rained like this in weeks, water pouring in sheets from the sky and soaking the sand under the Mosaic; they've soldiered on trying to solve it through sun and wind and cold, but they can't work like this. The peal of their spelled alarm bell could barely be heard below the rolling rumble of the coming storm, and when the skies split and started to pelt at the thatched roof overhead, El had nosed at the nape of his neck and pulled them even tighter together, murmuring _Go back to sleep_ into his hair in a voice that sounded like thunder, and he'd slipped back into warm, hazy bliss.

That had lasted for all of five minutes.

Then the unmistakable thunk of little feet on the rungs of the loft ladder and tearing across the cottage had been the only warning before Teddy pushed into their tiny room, pulled himself over the edge of the mattress, and plastered himself to Eliot's side, half-draped over Quentin in the process.

The last time they'd seen this kind of summer storm and been trapped in the cottage all day, El had gone on kind of a tear — scones and shortbread and poached plum tarte Tatin, plus a massive peach-glazed pound cake. And the next time, as Teddy loudly and repeatedly reminded them this morning, Papa had promised that he could bake, too.

El had groaned into Quentin's ear, flexing his fingers against the skin across his abdomen, and pressed his mouth to the bare slope of his shoulder. Then he'd thrown his arm up and yawned, big and showy and over-the-top, and rolled until Teddy was pinned beneath most of his back. _Oh no,_ he'd cried woefully, _I seem to have squashed something, I wonder what it could be_ , and Teddy had squealed and screamed _It's me, I'm something_ and squirmed in six-year-old glee until Eliot had mercy and moved away.

It's been about an hour since then, since El had pulled on pants and scooped up Teddy and grinned at Quentin's _It's okay, leave it open_ when he'd reached out to swing the shut door behind them. And he probably could have gone back to sleep, closed in the muffled cocoon of their bedroom, if he'd let Eliot seal him inside.

But then he wouldn't have been able to _watch_. And he has literally nothing better to do in the world.

They had started with bread.

Eliot had pulled together the sugar and salt and the jar of his precious starter, tutted the fire to life and put water on to boil. Then he'd stood Teddy on a chair at the table — looking every inch the part in the apron El had made him, raw sun-bleached linen Teddy had precariously tied on his own — and let him measure out the flour himself, let him mix it in with everything else spoonful by shaky spoonful, let him tip the big bowl over until the dough turned out on the tabletop like some kind of creature.

 _And now_ , El had said, _for the fun part_ , and taught him to push and pull the dough into submission. _It's a process,_ he'd told him, _but it's also kind of the only reason I ever had biceps._

Teddy had nodded, sagely, as if he understood, and punched at his pint-sized ball of dough with all his might.

Now the dough is back in the bowl, loosely covered with a damp towel and set aside to rise, Quentin is sprawled sideways across the bed to give himself a better view, and his boys have moved on to the filling for hand pies.

Eliot slices each plum into almost identical pieces, and Teddy systematically eats roughly every eighth one.

Raising an eyebrow, El picks up a new piece of fruit, clearly struggling to hold back a smile. "I can _see you_ , you know."

"Sorry," Teddy says, genuinely contrite, and turns away to cram the next one in his mouth.

Laughter bursts from Eliot's chest, and he wraps one arm around Teddy and buries the sound in his tawny hair. "Oh, kiddo," he sighs, "you are just like your dad," so fondly that something catches in Quentin's throat and sticks.

They put the surviving plums in a bowl with ginger and cinnamon and sugar and lemon zest, then Eliot heads to their makeshift fridge. The dough for these is different, involves ice cold water and a frozen block of butter and the hand grater El had commissioned from the blacksmith in town.

He'd made a batch the day before, all wrapped up in wax cloth to chill for some kind of Wellington tonight, but even Eliot's painstaking dinner menu can be derailed to provide for something like this.

"We can't touch it a lot," he tells Teddy firmly. "Our hands are too warm, and the butter will melt. So I need you to help me roll it out really fast, okay?" Teddy nods, wide-eyed and awestruck, and Eliot nods back. "But _first_ , we've got to flour the board again. You remember what I did before?"

Quentin has watched Eliot bake for years — back at Brakebills, then at Whitespire, now here in the home they've built. He knows El's habits by heart, setup to clean up and every step in between, knows the control he wields while he does it.

The ingredients scattered on the counter and the dishes piled in the sink are anomaly enough. But he is wholly unprepared for the sight of El's utterly unfazed smile as their son flings flour everywhere he can reach.

" _Perfect_ ," Eliot says, and Quentin's heart clenches in his chest.

El flours the rolling pin and folds himself around Teddy's back, bracketing his hands around a pair so much smaller and bracing his chin on the top of Teddy's head.

In all the time they've been here, Quentin has never wanted a camera more than right this moment.

They roll the sheet of pastry into an ever-widening rectangle until it's large enough to cut into six smaller shapes, and suddenly Teddy pulls his eyebrows together.

"Why do you know about baking?"

Eliot snorts. "Because it's cheaper than therapy," he answers, "and a hell of a lot less bitter."

"Okay," Teddy says, as if that made total sense to him, "but _how_?"

"Well that's a completely different question." He cracks an egg into a bowl and hands it off to Teddy with no further instructions — they've made enough morning omelets in the last few months that he knows what to do with this part. "My grandmother taught me. Like Nana Rae."

Teddy's face screws up in abject confusion; it's almost a shame that El can't see it. "Nana Rae can't make anything."

Eliot tilts his head. "And you will _never tell her that_."

He heaps half of one rectangle with filling and guides Teddy through doing the same with the others.

"Does that mean you didn't bake with your Papa?"

The look that flashes over Eliot's face is one Quentin wishes he could have missed.

"I did not," El says, straining to be even, as he spreads beaten egg over a pastry edge with one finger. "He didn't think that baking was something boys should do."

"That’s stupid," Teddy declares, preoccupied with putting all five of his fingers in the egg wash bowl and prying them apart to see the slimy stretch between them. "Baking is fun!"

"It is. On both counts." El scrubs the egg away with one corner of his own apron, then takes a second to sniff the top of Teddy's head. "Not everything is better where we come from, Teddy Bear."

"TV still sounds better. Better than boring old plays." The fact that Eliot doesn't object to the general disparagement of theater says a lot about his state of mind at the moment, but Teddy doesn't seem to notice anything amiss. "That's why Daddy doesn't bake? 'Cause it's not for boys back at Earth?"

"Daddy doesn't bake because he could burn water," Eliot scoffs, then swallows. "But Daddy and I had very different Papas."

Together, they fill all six pies and fold the other side of each piece of pastry over itself. El puts a fork in Teddy's fist and wraps his own fingers around both, crimping the edges with his non-dominant hand so Teddy can learn how it feels naturally. And somewhere between the two of them sprinkling sugar over the tops of the pies and poking a pair of holes in the pastry so the steam can escape, Quentin somehow slips back into sleep.

He stirs again when the magic-soft mattress shifts beneath him, wakes to the warm, yeasty smell of bread in the air and the even warmer shape of Eliot in his bed.

"Hey." Quentin stretches and scrubs at his eyes, listening past the lighter fall of rain on the roof. "Where's Teddy?"

"You mean pint-sized Paul Hollywood? Like father, like son. I stuffed him full of baked goods and sent him up for a nap." El reaches out to rub at his hip. "You hungry? I have it on good authority that there's a bunch of fresh bread in the house."

"In a little bit," Quentin mumbles. From here he can see that the table's still a mess, and the sight of it kind of makes him want to cry. "You know, um... I actually _did_ used to bake with my dad."

Eliot's whole face lights up in delighted surprise, so far from the face he'd made before. God, how quintessentially Eliot, to be happier for someone he cares about than he is sad for himself. "Oh yeah?"

Quentin nods, pushing up on his palms to sit cross-legged on the bed as Eliot goes up on one elbow. "I mean, not like _that_ ," he says, throwing an arm out toward the door. "But we'd always make those, um, those thumb cookies, the ones with the Hershey's Kisses on top? Only on Christmas Eve. So I had something to leave out for Santa."

El's expression melts at the edges, morphs into something soft and sweet. "I bet baby Q loved that."

"I mean, yeah, what kid doesn't love cookies? But, like... my dad wasn't great in the kitchen, okay, his specialty was Kraft mac and cheese."

Eliot hums. "That explains a lot about you."

"Fuck off." Quentin laughs, looking down at his hands. "I don't know. He could've, just, gotten some tub of cookie dough from the store and made life easier on himself, but. We always made them from scratch. Every year."

He'd never understood why. Not until he'd watched Eliot bake with Teddy today.

It's been hard to think of his father here — the man his son is named for, hanging in limbo in Quentin's last life and not even born yet in this one. Schrödinger's Dad.

"I just wish Teddy had known him, you know? I wish you both had."

A quick exhale, almost amused, makes him look down into Eliot's eyes.

"We do know him," El says, firmly present tense. "Because we know you. And not only are you the man that he raised, baby, you're the dad that he taught you to be. The same way I'm the one mine taught me not to."

Everything in Quentin's chest floods with warmth, flush with the knowledge that El is not only an even better father than Quentin thought he would be, he's a better father than he himself ever thought he _could_ be, and believes it enough to say it out loud. He folds forward to catch Eliot's mouth with his own, chase the taste of peach preserves and tart plum pie, and thinks _holy shit, you are so good at this_.

"You were right, before," he says, "about Teddy. How much he's like me."

"I know. It's one of my favorite things about him. Maybe the only reason I keep him around at all." Eliot smiles and kisses him again. "He is like you, Q. That's part of what makes him such a great kid."

"Maybe," Quentin says, sinking into the sound of the rain and the smell of his home, sugar and spice and everything Eliot. "But he wants to be like you. That's what makes him the best."

**_bake me a door (to help me get through)_ **  
  


The penthouse is too quiet at night.

To be fair, every night Quentin had slept here before had been spent hovering on pins and needles, at the very edge of awareness, bracing himself for the next sudden breath at the back of his neck and hands that don't hold him the way that they should.

Maybe that's why, most nights, he plants himself on the living room sofa with the lights on and the TV blaring, until someone — usually Penny — comes to the bannister to tell him _It's too late for this shit_. Why, every night, he lies awake behind a locked door and his bedroom's blackout curtains, staring at the ceiling and wondering _what the fuck do we do now?_ Why, tonight, once he finally thinks _fuck this_ and rolls out of bed and through the door and down the hall to the kitchen, when he sees the body behind the counter in an all-too-familiar size and shape, his first thought isn’t _Eliot_ , it’s _Monster_.

Why, in the time and space before he can blink, he's almost relieved.

But his brain is only fooled for a second, before it registers the clean hair that's been trimmed into shorter, much neater curls, the elaborate velvet and brocade of the clothing. The fluid way that body moves with all of Eliot's effortless grace, instead of some ungainly creature wearing his skin.

"Hey."

There's a strange sense of satisfaction in seeing those shoulders jerk and spin around. In startling this body, no matter who happens to be driving it. "Hey," Eliot says, strangely caught. "Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you."

That much is obvious from the space itself — it's still dark in the rest of the apartment, nothing lit but the light bar under the upper cabinets and the glass pendants hanging over the island.

Quentin shakes his head, sliding onto a stool. "You didn't."

Leave it to Eliot to flawlessly navigate a completely foreign kitchen at four in the fucking morning. Quentin's pretty sure he doesn't know where the under-cabinet light switch even _is_. But beyond that, the digital display on the upper wall oven is on, and there's a telltale cluster of matching containers sitting along the edge of the counter, every last one of them empty.

Irrationally, it feels like a slap in the face. Eliot may have taught Teddy to bake, back at the Mosaic, but Teddy had taught him to truly _enjoy_ it. To embrace the process as well as the perfection, and let himself love it even when it was messy. And long before Teddy had followed in his father's footsteps and beyond — set off for Brighthaven with all his Earth recipes and his innate and inherited talent, to bake with an artisan master — El had followed his example, and baked because it was _fun_.

But even before the Monster, before they'd ever restored magic, a lot of things had gone back to the way they were.

"How are you, Q?"

Quentin blows out a breath that's nearly a laugh. "Feeling kind of massively underdressed at the moment," he mutters. "You?"

He's also getting tired of sitting in this spot, having conversations with people who used to be his whole world and have also let him down easy, but that's probably a bigger answer than Eliot had bargained for.

"Ah." El glances down at his ensemble, then shrugs, as if it's perfectly normal to be baking in Fillory's finest. "I guess all of my actual clothes are still back at Brakebills, so it was either go full Fillorian or take my chances with the crumpled collection of sad graphic tees."

"What are you doing here, Eliot?"

He'd meant to give it some heat, but it's warm in the kitchen, and it just comes out a little weary.

Well, whatever works.

He's been exhausted since he was someone else, dragged all around the globe by a baby god with a grudge. And even after it was over — after their Penny had smuggled them a forbidden book with a forgotten ritual, after Zelda had taken out Everett and flooded the world with magic just in time for Margo to sink an axe into each of Eliot's shoulders and pull the Monster out with them — it hadn't gotten any better.

After the park, and the plan, and _peaches and plums, motherfucker_ , when he'd been running on nothing but hope… it still feels like Eliot is every bit as gone. He'd taken Quentin's face between his palms, eyes bright and awed and _his_ , and said _Q_ , in the same reverent key he had the day he'd shoved Quentin's heart back into his body.

Then he'd healed up at Brakebills, and headed straight back to Fillory with Margo and Josh.

That was weeks ago, now. And Quentin hasn't seen him since.

El smiles, small and shaky, licking over his lower lip and nodding almost to himself.

"I'm sorry," he says, thick and flat, "I don't… you know what, I can go."

Quentin snorts. "You're gonna go before you can bake whatever it is you couldn't pull off back at Whitespire?"

Eliot rolls his eyes up toward the ceiling for a second, then pulls a large, covered container from the stretch of counter at his back and sets the whole thing in front of him. "Not so much, no."

There are questions hanging on the tip of Quentin's tongue — how had he baked already, it still smells like fake flowers and ozone out here — but there's a memory in his head, sparked by the look on El's face, that has struck him entirely speechless.

_These are actually for you._

He pries the lid off the container, foil crinkling at the edge, and nested inside are dozens of perfectly round, golden-brown cookies, each one topped with a glossy chocolate kiss.

"It's Christmas Eve," Eliot says, and squints. "Technically. And I know it's the first one without your dad. I just… god, this sounds so fucking _stupid_ now… I didn't want you to be without cookies for Santa, too."

"I, um," Quentin starts, stops, stares at the cookies and swallows hard around the shock. "I didn't even realize you remembered that."

"I remember _everything_."

The tone of it, wistful and wondrous, that makes him snap his eyes back up to Eliot, and probably what makes Eliot laugh and look away. "It's not that big a deal. Josh wouldn't shut up about the kitchen, and pretty much everything was here. It's not even that hard to make kisses, really, if you melt some chocolate and… have a funnel —"

"El. Thank you. It's not stupid, okay, it's actually… really thoughtful."

"It's kind of the least I could do, but. You're welcome." He wipes his hands on the towel hanging from the oven door and shoots a smile over his shoulder. "Merry Christmas, Q."

"Wait," Quentin says, "you're really leaving?"

Eliot's smile turns sheepish, even as he turns to face him again. "I'm not sure if the hour has escaped you, but it wasn't really a social call."

Quentin's hands tighten on the tin of cookies, realization dawning as he replays the _I didn't mean to wake you_ that had opened Eliot's side of the conversation.

"Were you just gonna leave these?" El doesn't say anything, but his mouth drops open — his surest sign of guilt — and his eyes flick to the whiteboard on the fridge. Quentin shakes his head, huffing out a breath. "So you really weren't planning on seeing me at all."

"Quentin —"

"No, just, explain to me what's happening here, Eliot. Because it feels like I fought to get you back just to immediately lose you again." He pushes to his feet, stinging behind his eyes and burning at the back of his throat. "God, you keep saying these things that turn my life upside down, and _I don't know which things to believe_. And maybe that isn't fair. Maybe that day in the park, the day you broke out with peaches and plums and _proof of fucking concept_ , maybe you didn't mean anything by it beyond proving that it was actually you. But it really… it felt like you did."

Eliot tilts his head and takes a step forward, his eyes wet and pleading. "Q, I —"

"Only, _that's not us_. Right? Not me, and _definitely_ not you. But you remember everything. And we had a family. And this, El, _this_ —" He swipes at his eyes and sweeps a hand over the container full of cookies, Eliot's fingerprints pressed into every one. "This feels like someone who loves me."

"Of course I love you, Quentin," Eliot says, his voice indescribable now. "When was that ever in question?"

Drained and deflated, Quentin blows out a breath and sinks back to the stool like his strings have been cut. "Then where have you been?"

"Running," El answers. "Hiding. Pick a playground game." He shuffles over, as inelegant as he gets, and takes a seat on the next stool over. "I meant it, what I said that day. I'd just had a big breakthrough of emotional maturity with the you that lived in my head — that's a long story, just go with it for now. Then there you were, the _real_ you. And I had to say something to undo all the self-hating bullshit that I'd said before."

Quentin must look on the verge of passing out, at the least, pretty pale — Eliot pushes the cookies toward him, waits for him to take one and watches him take a bite. It melts in his mouth, buttery sweet, and tastes just like his childhood and somehow something better.

"I had a plan, you know. The whole time I was in trapped in there, after I made it out, I planned out exactly how I would fix my massive fuck-up. Running from you, because I didn't trust myself to become the person you had already made me once."

He chews again — he'd gotten a bite of chocolate this time — until he can ask the question, even though he's afraid of the answer. "So what changed?"

"I did," Eliot says sadly. "Margo filled me in on what I missed. On what I did to you. And I really thought I'd lucked out, you know, since I didn't remember any of it… But that just means I get to _imagine it_ , and I have a pretty vivid imagination." He chokes out a laugh, tongue trapped between his teeth. "It's hard to run from your shadow, Q, it knows everywhere you're going."

His fingers trace over the intricate swirls along the inside of his thighs, as if his hands are restless, his eyes locked somewhere south of contact.

Quentin realizes, then, that Eliot hasn't laid a hand on him since he's been here. Maybe the longest stretch of conversation without a single touch that they've ever had.

He reaches out to hold El's face in his own hands, traces the line of his jaw with one thumb and tries not to cry when Eliot shivers.

"I know this is technically plagiarism, or whatever, but... maybe your _self-hating bullshit_ can be good for something after all." He pulls in a breath and leans forward to kiss the words into Eliot's mouth, and what they taste like more than anything is the future. "That _definitely_ wasn't you, El. Would never be. Not when you have a choice."

**_let's see the next amazing thing baking does now_ **  
  


_"Fuck."_

The sound of Eliot's rolling laughter behind him would be grating if he didn't feel so goddamn good.

"Aww, baby," El rumbles, repeating the same slow slide, "that pretty mouth keeps writing checks that your ass has to cash."

Quentin can only groan in reply; cheesy as it may be, his ass isn't exactly complaining.

If you'd asked him earlier this morning if he had plans to get bent over their kitchen counter and fucked until he couldn't form actual words… well, knowing Eliot, nothing is outside the realm of possibility, so the odds wouldn't exactly have been zero. But this is better than anything he could have imagined.

Eliot rolls his hips and hits him deep, lighting up everything inside him susceptible to friction and shorting out the part of his brain keeping him upright. His elbows buckle and bend, until he's laid out flat on Eliot's precious marble-topped bake station.

The sight of it must be working for El; he slides one hand up his spine to his shoulder and pulls him hard into the next thrust, and Quentin barely gets a breath in before he does it again.

"Oh god," he chokes, pushing on his palms to ride back into it. " _Harder._ "

Which might be counterproductive, considering, but it's hard to give a shit at the moment. Not when Eliot clearly takes it as a challenge, and accepts: grips him in both big hands, leans in with his weight, and fucks into him even faster.

Quentin loses track of anything but sensation — the drag of skin across the cool stone, the heat of Eliot inside him. Then he shifts, and something sparks white hot along every one of his nerve endings. El must sense it; one hand slips between him and the edge of the counter, reaches around for his cock, and Quentin frantically shakes his head, feeling floaty and high and _possessed_.

"No, I think I can —" For a second, everything stutters to a stop — his words and his breath and his whole goddamn _brain_ — at the drag of Eliot's dick against his prostate. He can. He definitely can. "I'm close, just — oh _god_ , El — just fuck it out of me."

"Baby, _fuck,_ " Eliot hisses, snapping his hips hard, and Quentin squeezes his eyes shut and arches off the counter as all the air punches out of his lungs.

El fucks him through it, ramping down to a rolling grind, until Quentin is boneless and panting and his vision can almost focus again.

"Holy shit, Q, _holy shit_. What the hell was that?"

Quentin's head lolls on the counter until he's up on his chin, blinking at the timer a few scant inches from his face, and clenches with whatever inner strength he has left, just to feel Eliot tremble. "You have two minutes."

Sex with Eliot is incredible at literally any particular moment, but he inexplicably loves this one — when El has already driven him over the edge and out of his mind, and finally turns that focus on himself.

It spurs him back into action, but not back to the pace — he lays himself over Quentin's back and winds his right hand into his hair. But his left slides into Quentin's to lace their fingers together where the bands of bare skin match, and holds on while he rocks hard into him until he shakes apart.

They're still breathing together, a tangle of clothing and limbs sprawled across the counter, when the timer dings beside their heads.

"You win," Quentin says, and sighs. Christ, he feels drunk.

Eliot straightens up and slaps his ass, then carefully pulls out and tuts through a quick cleanup that always feels like static electricity. He hadn't even made it out of his pants. "Baby, I think you'll find that we both won today."

Despite the spell, El washes his hands before he pulls the pan out of the oven, the welcome smell of cinnamon and sugar hitting Quentin full force.

He takes his turn at the sink, fishing their rings out of the little dish by the faucet. "A bet's a bet," he says, handing Eliot his. "We finished before the baking, so we'll send your ridiculous card."

Eliot pushes his ring onto his finger, then spreads both his hands. "'Buns fresh from our oven, to celebrate the one in yours.' What's ridiculous about that?"

Quentin inhales the fresh-baked smell again, letting it fill his nostrils the way it fills the little home they've built here in Brooklyn, with Eliot's custom baker's kitchen and Quentin's garden-level workshop for mending rare books. They have a big bay window full of thriving plants and a ginger tabby by the name of Jane Catwin, who tolerates him most days but absolutely adores Eliot and doesn’t purr so much as she coos like a pigeon.

And soon, according to the news they got this morning, they'll also have a baby.

El's first instinct was to shove all his happiness into a ball of dough and send it to their surrogate. And after all the negative emotions he's baked away over the course of almost a century, Quentin will never stop him from pouring everything sweet and good in him into a pan and letting the world have a taste.

So he goes up on his toes to kiss the love of his lives, to taste forever on his tongue. 

"Nothing at all," he says. "I'm on icing."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments fill my soul. <3


End file.
